The many winding paths of Joshua Boyle

The many winding paths of Joshua Boyle

A wannabe spy for CSIS, Star Wars gamer, son of a federal court judge, and briefly husband to Zaynab Khadr; the man held hostage in Afghanistan for five years, is now a captive in a Canadian jail facing criminal charges

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The many winding paths of Joshua Boyle

What a collective exhale of I-told-you-so and I-knew-something-was-wrong. When Joshua Boyle was arrested New Year’s Day on charges of assault, sexual assault, forcible confinement, drugging, uttering death threats and misleading police, the news hit as an alarming coda to the strangest of stories.

Not that this specific development was expected, but that something — anything — might begin to explain the inexplicable, might unravel the couple’s bizarre circumstance; something potentially revealing about Boyle, and his personality in particular, that brought him into the limelight.

There is certainly a lot about Joshua Boyle screaming for explication.

A wannabe spy for CSIS, raised in a rural, devoutly Christian southern Ontario home, the son of a federal court judge, who married and then divorced Zaynab Khadr, who once lived in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan, is only the start of his unusual attributes. His harrowing ordeal — taking his pregnant second bride, an American whom he met through a Star Wars gaming forum, backpacking through unstable Afghanistan where they were abducted and held hostage for five years until their rescue in October — is more perplexing still.

And now his arrest, on allegations that span the time since his return to Canada, less than two weeks after the Boyle family’s cheery visit with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, caps the intrigue.

His wife, Caitlan Coleman, 32, pointed to trauma from their captivity on his mental state as something of a trigger on the unproven charges and the court system has only just started to wade through the evidence.

Their story is sad and distressing but also perplexing and bizarre. Since his release, Boyle’s public statements, alternating between over-sharing and evasion, seem strange and, to many, suspicious. The nature of these charges now brings a huge blow to Boyle’s flagging public credibility.

Joshua Ainsley Boyle was born the son of Linda Boyle and Patrick Boyle, a long-time tax lawyer with a leading law firm who was appointed as a judge in the Tax Court of Canada in 2007 by the Conservative government.

Boyle was homeschooled in Breslau, Ont., about 100 kilometres west of Toronto, before attending a small, private Christian high school in nearby Kitchener. Rockway Mennonite Collegiate blends “sound academic learning” with “a passion for peacemaking and service to God,” according to the school’s website.

Boyle’s yearbook photo in 2002 shows him with unfashionably long hair and a reserved smile. Staff and former classmates described him as a quiet and creative student with good grades, when speaking to a reporter with the Waterloo Record.

In his yearbook, Boyle’s chosen quotation oozed with teen pomposity: “When I was young I discovered I was neither God nor Satan. I was so disappointed in myself, I never bothered to narrow it down any further.”

An old friend described Boyle as “charismatic, principled, and passionate about his causes.”

Joshua Boyle, his wife, Caitlan Boyle and their three children, left to right: Noah, Jonah and Grace, in downtown Ottawa after they were rescued. (Wayne Cuddington / Postmedia News)

Alex Edwards said he met Boyle in 2002 through an online gaming forum. They realized they lived close to each other and became friends in real life, Edwards wrote in a blog. After the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, Boyle had become interested in extremists. Not so about much their ideology but the people behind them.

“He wrote about Nazis, terrorists, and killers, not because he sympathized with them, but because he thought it was important for people to understand them. He hated that people could be reduced to soundbites and caricatures, because that’s the point where critical thinking stops,” Edwards wrote. He declined to be interviewed this week given Boyle’s charges.

“He had a deep insight into human nature, and a knack for finding loopholes. There’s nothing he loved more than standing up for what he believed in, especially if it gave him a chance to thumb his nose at authority.”

The same Star Wars gaming forum brought Caitlan Coleman and Boyle together. Both of them joined The Jedi Council Forum in 2000 and were active participants for years. The Jedi Council Forum and another online community seemed his primary social outlet, leading to online friendships and real-life relationships, including his first kiss.

Boyle and Coleman had much in common. She grew up in Stewartstown, Pa., a small, rural community west of Philadelphia. She was also homeschooled by a devout Christian family and both were considered nerds, into Star Wars, computer games and science fiction.

Caitlan Coleman shortly after she moved to Toronto from her home in Pennsylvania to stay with Joshua Boyle in 2007. The photo was taken by Boyle as he showed her the city (Caitlan Coleman’s blog)

Boyle, using the name JediWarrior, was something of a forum troll, but a knowledgeable and engaging one. Forum administrators said he was not their favourite contributor.

In 2005, in a forum thread titled “Girls Gone Wild Baghdad,” Boyle baits members, saying they should be more like him — “reading a lot of books, studying a lot of religion, talking to a lot of different people.” He insulted members for their “ignorance and stereotyping.” In April 2006 he started a thread noting the high proportion of members who were homeschooled and have Asperger syndrome.

Many members met in real life. Videos show Coleman, her face painted, laughing and talking to other members. One member remembered Coleman from a group lunch: “I still remember her praying before eating and how that was the first time I had ever seen someone do that in public beyond a special holiday gathering.”

In 2005, when Boyle was finishing Liberal Studies at the University of Waterloo, Boyle and Coleman presented themselves in the forum as being sexually involved. In 2007, Coleman left Pennsylvania to join Boyle in Toronto.

“I’m not running away from my life here, but I recognize life is guiding me in a new direction,” Coleman wrote in 2007 in a blog. “I’ve always dreamed of seeing the world… For the first time in a very humdrum life the winds of change have been blowing, I am not about to stand against them.”

Joshua Boyle playing video games on a mattress used by Caitlan Coleman in his Toronto apartment in 2007 when the two lived together before his marriage and subsequent divorce to Zaynab Khadr. (Caitlan Coleman’s blog)

She joined Boyle in June 2007 at his small, unkempt apartment she called “Josh’s cave.” She spent time in her first week cleaning and scrubbing dried food off old dishes.

“If I ever have to survive in a hut in Africa, mess won’t be an issue for me,” she quipped. She planned to stay four months but her departure is not documented.

By then, Boyle seemed to be developing something of an obsession with the Khadr family. It was the war on terrorism that brought Boyle into the Khadr fold.

Arriving to support the families of the accused was Zaynab Khadr and her mother, Maha Elsamnah. Zaynab is the eldest daughter of Ahmed Said Khadr, an al-Qaida member and the family had spent years in Afghanistan, including in Osama bin Laden’s compound.

At a time when Boyle’s employment seemed itinerant — there are accounts of him working as a parking lot attendant and in the University of Toronto’s library — Boyle started coming to court as well, friends said. He was solicitous and fawning to the Khadrs.

“He was hanging around the court, hanging out inside the courtroom, ingratiating himself with Zaynab and her mother,” a Khadr friend said.

The Khadr family were told Boyle had previously applied to join the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada’s spy agency. It made their supporters distrustful of his motives.

Despite suspicions and warnings, Zaynab Khadr became close to Boyle. He said he planned to write a book about the Khadrs, an inside account with the assistance and support of some of the family. Khadr gave him documents and material to help him.

“It was pretty worrying,” said a family friend. “He was looking not to join the Islamic faith, but as a way to get information from Zaynab about the Khadrs. I didn’t trust him from start to finish,” said another.

Their relationship continued to grow. They were married in early 2009, in a small ceremony officiated at Toronto City Hall. Her wedding to Boyle was different from Zaynab’s previous two arranged marriages, including one attended by bin Laden.

Their relationship was not publicly known until a mysterious break-in and shooting at the home of Boyle’s parents in 2009. The investigation revealed the connection and it was seen as a possible motive for the theft. It is believed the material stolen from Boyle’s home were Khadr documents given to Boyle for his book.

His unexpected connection to the Khadrs made him an instant person of interest to the media.

“I love research,” Boyle said in 2009 in an interview with the Globe and Mail after his marriage was revealed. “Anything related to terrorism on Wikipedia, I wrote, pretty much.”

Anything related to terrorism on Wikipedia, I wrote, pretty much

Joshua Boyle

The Post has discovered that as a Wikipedia editor, Boyle made 809 edits to the online entry on Omar Khadr, Zaynab’s brother, and 377 to Ahmed Said Khadr, Zaynab’s father, his two most active page edits.

His third most active interest was Charles Whitman, an American mass murderer known as the “Texas Tower Sniper” and his fourth the Wikipedia entry on Ahnenerbe, a Nazi Germany project to research the history of the Aryan race.

In 2008, Boyle also uploaded personal photos of the Khadr family to Wikipedia.

Boyle said it was his interest in researching and contributing to the open-source web encyclopedia that led him to send an introductory email to Zaynab in 2008, he told the Globe in the interview, an account at odds with those who remember him as a hanger-on at the 2006 Toronto 18 hearings.

Zaynab said in the same interview that she first met her mother-in-law at an anti-abortion rally outside Toronto’s Mortgentaler Clinic; she suspected Linda Boyle hadn’t met a Muslim woman in a niqab before but said tension was eased by unified opposition to abortion.

After the break-in, Boyle started to be recognized at rallies and protests, beefy and bearded, with the same long hair from high school, often standing near Zaynab Khadr. He was at a protest in Toronto in 2009 over former U.S. Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton’s visit.

Their marriage ended 18 months later.

Boyle wanted a more subservient spouse than Zaynab would accommodate, family friends said, and their relationship crumbled.

Boyle and Khadr applied for divorce on Dec. 9, 2010, according to court records. The uncontested divorce was granted March 18, 2011.

It is not known precisely how or when Boyle’s relationship with Coleman was rekindled, but the two married soon after Boyle’s divorce was finalized.

Joshua Boyle and Caitlan Coleman are shown in captivity in this still image taken from a video. (Site Intelligence Group / Canadian Press)

Before Boyle and Coleman left on their odyssey in Afghanistan, they landed in what could hardly have been a more different place — the New Brunswick village of Perth-Andover.

They moved into a run-down bungalow, apparently bought by his father, on the outskirts of the pretty Appalachian Mountains community, and Boyle found work at the Thing5 call centre, fielding hotel-reservation requests, says neighbour Andrew Brown.

Boyle kept largely to himself, making little impression on the town of 1,600 people, local residents say.

“He used to ride his bicycle down to the call centre and walk it back up the hill, and he always had a milk crate on the back of the bike,” Brown said. “You hardly ever seen him out and about or anywhere.”

Co-workers said he had converted or was converting to Islam, according to a 2013 news release issued by Terry Ritchie, then the mayor of Perth-Andover, during the couple’s captivity.

“Josh kept a prayer rug rolled up in the basement of the call centre where he was an employee for less than a year,” Ritchie wrote. “He was given special breaks from his job as a customer service representative to pray at appropriate times,” co-workers say.

He said authorities searched Boyle’s Perth-Andover home after the couple was abducted. A flood on the St. John River that bisects the town caused extensive damage to it in March 2012, closing down the call centre. It appears Boyle had left by then and a neighbour whose home had been damaged in the flood rented Boyle’s house for a time.

Boyle’s father sent a U-haul truck to load up his son’s belongings, which included some unusual items, said another neighbour, who didn’t want to be named. Among the items were medical forceps, chains and leather straps, a resident said.

George Michaud, another neighbour, said he never spoke to either Boyle or Coleman but saw them collecting wood from their property and having bonfires in the backyard.

“I don’t know if they had any power in the house or not,” said Michaud.

Boyle recently mused that he might return to Perth-Andover, but Brown said he may not be welcome — not because of his links to the Khadrs or his strange odyssey, but if he is found guilty of sex offences.

“The community itself will not allow it,” Brown said. “The poor guy wouldn’t live. People would not put up with it. They wouldn’t hesitate in burning the house down over it.”

The couple spent a few months in Central America before heading to Asia in July 2012. They traveled through Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan.

Richard Cronin, a British backpacker and adventurer, met Boyle and Coleman in a hostel in Kyrgyzstan in November 2012, when the couple was planning to head south-west into Afghanistan, Cronin wrote in his blog. Boyle rhapsodized about his plan, comparing the opportunity to Lawrence of Arabia and British explorer Richard Burton, famous for traveling to Mecca in disguise when Europeans were forbidden to visit.

Boyle said the window to visit was closing because the security situation would only get worse, Cronin wrote.

Caitlan Coleman and Joshua Boyle after they were kidnapped. (Coleman Family via AP)

Their last contact with family was an email on Oct. 8, 2012, saying they were in an “unsafe” area of Afghanistan. Withdrawals were made from their bank account that day, and the next, from Kabul. Then they vanished.

In 2013, their families were shown two video messages from the couple being held captive by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network, a brutal, militant organization. In them, they ask for the U.S. government to free them and their baby.

Their ordeal was traumatic. The couple said the family was abused, beaten, Coleman raped, one of her pregnancies involuntarily terminated, moved often, and their three children born in captivity.

In 2016, two videos of the family were posted on YouTube. The couple was barely recognizable. Both had lost weight and looked weary and pale. Boyle in one looked particularly gaunt. They urged all governments to work together to secure their freedom.

During his captivity Boyle was urged to join the Haqqani network — which he called “ghetto trash gangbangers” and “religious hypocrites” pretending to be Islamic militants in emails sent to the Toronto Sun after his release. He harshly rejected the offers and mocked them, he said. He refused to say whether he had converted to Islam.

He dreamt of rising up against his captors — “I really was willing to kill them,” he told the Sun.

The Boyle-Coleman family’s freedom came without such confrontation after intervention from the Pakistani military. They were recovered from the trunk of a “luxury SUV,” after a car chase and shooting, he told Maclean’s.

Caitlan Coleman, Joshua Boyle and two of their children appeared in a video released by Taliban Media in Dec. 2016. (Taliban Media via AP)

The couple arrived back in Canada at Toronto’s Pearson airport on Oct. 13, with their three young children. Media scrambled to see them and hear their story. After release, they first stayed at the Boyle family home in Smiths Falls, Ont. The public was entranced and perplexed.

Boyle’s ability to make odd statements continued in the weeks ahead. In a recent interview with Maclean’s magazine he said they had to leave his parent’s small home because “it was intolerable.”

Signs of Boyle’s controlling nature emerged during Maclean’s interviews — he refused to leave the room while Coleman spoke and at one point chastised her for answering a question, saying “Check with me before you say any of that on the recording,” Maclean’s reported.

On Dec. 19, the couple met with Trudeau at his office in Ottawa. Photos of the meeting — with Ma’idah Grace, their youngest child, bouncing on the Prime Minister’s knee, Dhakwœn Noah, 2, posing for pictures, while Najæshi Jonah, 5, seen rearranging furniture — were released by the family on a Twitter account confrontationally called @BoylesVsWorld.

Boyle said he spoke with Trudeau about the Haqqani network and their role in his wife’s miscarriage.

The pinned message on the Twitter account, in fancy script, says: “The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever.”

It is a mantra he seems to have been reminding himself for years despite having plenty to say about things he wanted to talk about, and little to offer on those he did not.

Boyle remains in jail awaiting his next court appearance, scheduled for Jan 8. A court order prevents publication of information that would identify the alleged victims.